Who is behind the cyber attacks in Australia?

9 December 20212 years ago babelfish

A hacker attack threatened to paralyze Australia's electricity grid. Here's what happened

A hacker attack threatened to paralyze Australia's power grid and millions of Australians were in danger of being out of power due to a ransomware attack on November 27. The attack was aimed at one of the largest Australian companies, namely CS Energy.

The attack was only stopped at the last minute before it had the potential to shut down the company's two coal-fired power plants. If the damage had occurred, they could have stolen 35,000 megawatts of power from the grid, leaving between 1.4 and three million homes in the dark.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison noted Wednesday that Australian cyber authorities played a crucial role in stopping the attack.

"The Australian government took swift action to engage those who were directly threatened and we were able to ensure that the worst of these scenarios did not occur," Morrison said . “So it was the timely action of our IT authorities that averted a negative result there. And I want to thank them for the great job they do. We know that the cyber threats to Australia are real, both in the sense of defense, but also only in the civil sphere ".

Morrison also pointed out that the criminal actors were looking to take advantage of Australians and Australian businesses. “It is so important that Australian companies listen carefully and accept the advice of our cybersecurity agencies,” he said. "Australia is one of the world leaders in this area".

Morrison also refused to confirm whether the attack was carried out by Chinese hackers.

However, as the analysis carried out by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute amply demonstrated, Beijing is most likely the "state cyber actor" behind the growing cyber attacks on Australia.

Cybercrime came into greater focus this year in a report by the Australian Cyber Security Center (ACSC), a department of ASD, Australia's first line of defense against cyber incidents, which showed that cyber attacks are increased by 13% in the last 12 months.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/australia-attacchi-informatici/ on Thu, 09 Dec 2021 06:44:02 +0000.